James Stephens

Image 2

Let’s try a more challenging image. This next image has 2-3 stops more dynamic range than the camera can handle. I exposed enough so as just not to clip the shadows leaving some quite highly overexposed sky outside the window.

Before tone mapping
Canon 5D with 24-105 f/4L IS lens @ ISO 200
(click image to enlarge)

Let’s see how the plugin does:

After tone mapping
Canon 5D with 24-105 f/4L IS lens @ ISO 200
(click image to enlarge)

The tone mapping does a good job of pulling out detail from the shadows inside the cafe, particularly under the table. It doesn’t do much for the highlights comprising the sky outside the window as there is simply too much overexposure but I’m not concerned about that in this image.

Tips

• The plugin can easily be overdone if you are not careful. I would say that the default strength of 40% would probably be the maximum I would apply to an image and my preference is typically for around 15-25%. For the above images I would go with less but I’m showing you the default here for illustrative effect.
• If you have any noise at all in the image before tone mapping is conducted, the plugin will amplify it. I chose not to do noise reduction beforehand on the above images since they were shot at ISO 200 on a Canon EOS 5D which has extremely low noise characteristics and the final images are only low resolution Jpeg’s for web display.
• Expose to the right as much as possible. If you have a scene with 1-2 stops more dynamic range than the camera is capable of handling, you are better off over exposing such that the histogram shows no shadow clipping. The reason is that there is often a little headroom in RAW files beyond that indicated by the histogram and highlight recovery at the RAW conversion can pull back some of the highlight detail. Also, you don’t want to waste headroom in the RAW file.